Christmas II
26 December 2011 Leave a Comment
Painting by Brad Smalt
Wandering the Gallery: Survey before evaluate
19 November 2011 1 Comment
This next Thanksgiving week, my wife and I will be traveling back to our old stomping grounds in Northwest Arkansas. I was hoping to visit the recently completed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (funny video announcing their opening) if we could squeeze it into our trip. Sadly, you need to reserve tickets to get in before January, and the day we’ll be down there is already sold out. Regardless, the opportunity started me thinking about my own gallery experiences again.
I’ve recently come to realize that I like to survey an exhibit or gallery before intently viewing individual works. I’m trying to decide if this is just a part of who I am or if it’s an unfortunate symptom of a culture too fast paced for its own good. Maybe some of both.
Of course, this means that some of the time I don’t get back to viewing individual works. I’m curious to hear how other people approach a museum of art, if they’ve ever thought through it.
Nursery Art: Horse Head #4
23 October 2011 2 Comments
The final in the Nursery Art series, Horse Head #4 by Olson, 21/250.
Nursery Art: “Anl lh 2/9″
15 October 2011 Leave a Comment
Yes, as far as I can discern, that is the title of this next work by Olson. The artist must have been quite tired when scrawling the title onto this print, because it’s not remotely legible in comparison to the three others. Number 168/250.
Nursery Art: Horse Head #2
2 October 2011 3 Comments
Just after moving to Arkansas, round about 2003 or 2004, a frame shop in Siloam Springs closed its doors. They had a sale as such, and we ended up purchasing a few things for the office and a few prints.
Included in the prints we purchased were four etchings of carousel horses. They are signed “Olson” and are very well done. We bought them with our future child in mind, for the nursery. We still have them, and after 10 years of marriage we finally have a reason to frame them. Here’s the first for your viewing pleasure, Horse Head #2 by Olson, number 21/250.
Thriving arts and crafts in [very] rural places
31 July 2011 Leave a Comment
Yesterday my wife and I drove two hours north to the very small town of Clearwater, Nebraska. One of the seven or so yarn stores in the state happens to be in this community of 300+. We had a great discussion with MareLee, the proprietor of the business, about creativity, community and the unHurried prairie life.
Prairie Threads (website down at the time of this writing) opened about two years ago. When she told the town council she planned to open a fiber arts store they thought she was crazy but supported her anyway. Clearwater, like so many other tiny towns, is on the verge of dying.
Hannah & Maisie & threads
Her good friends back in Washington State, where she had recently moved from, thought she was nuts as well, certifiable. Why would someone move from a lush, populated, coastal state to the landlocked Great Plains, to the edge of a grass covered desert, to a sleepy little town?
All of those Washington friends have since visited her in the Nebraska Sandhills, and none of them are questioning her sanity any longer. Upon visiting, her friends realized how productive she was artistically after getting away from the frenetic city-dweller mentality. They realized you can sit and have a real conversation without the pressure of somewhere to go, someone to see, something to do. They saw how she is now a real part of the community she lives in — crazy or not — in a way she never experienced living in the big city.
We talked about Kathleen Norris’ book Dakota
I drew a lot of parallels to the Scissortail art center idea during the conversation. MareLee pointed out that the yarn store venture was a lot of work and required years of persistence preceding success. Teaching is a key aspect of her business (she has 40 years of experience to draw from across all fiber arts: knitting, spinning, dyeing, weaving, etc). She was able to purchase a home and place of business for a song (her son, living and working in Washington D.C., pointed out that what she paid was barely a down payment on a place in the city).
If you’re ever in north-central Nebraska, make it a point to stop into this prairie gem. While you’re up there, have a meal at Green Gables in Orchard, Nebraska, a barn converted into a restaurant.
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Wendell Berry on art and craft
29 July 2011 Leave a Comment
International Arts Movement’s Kendall Ruth quoting Wendell Berry:
“Real – that is, living – art and culture . . . rise from and return to action, the slightest as well as the grandest deeds of everybody’s everyday life. How much excellence in ‘the arts’ is to be expected from a people who are poor at carpentry, sewing, farming, gardening, and cooking? To believe that you can have a culture distinct from, or as a whole greatly better than, such work is not just illogical or wrong – it is to make peace with the shoddy, the meretricious, and the false.”
Storm-gazing
16 July 2011 1 Comment
I often refer to myself as a wannabe storm chaser, but a more accurate description would probably be that I’m an aspiring storm-gazer.
When a person here’s the term “storm chaser” they automatically think of someone, in this era of cable TV, who is trying to get as close to a tornado as they can without dying. I don’t need to see a tornado to feel as though I’ve had a successful outing storm-gazing, although tornadic storms are often the most picturesque. In fact, in most cased I’d rather be miles away from the storm, looking back at the supercell in full. I want structure such as the updraft, anvil and mammatus to be clearly visible so I can sketch or photograph them and put them into clay.
I’d like to be able to chase storm-gazing opportunities, and have made very mild attempts at doing so a couple of times the past couple of years. Storm-gazing from home, from Grand Island, has been very poor so far this season. We’ve had a few storms roll by, but it’s either been at night or while it was overcast to begin with.
Yesterday evening a nice little supercell formed just south of Grand Island, and in my unfortunate hurries I somehow missed its birth until it was more or less just a gray anvil overhead. The rear flank was visible to the west, but it wasn’t photogenic with the bright, late afternoon sun still bearing down on it, aiding in the storm’s development.
A couple of hours later some of the structure was quite nice, though, as the cell slowly floated north over Grand Island. An acquaintance from high school posted this stellar capture to Facebook, and I stitched together the following panorama taken from my driveway with DoubleTake.
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